An electronic component is a component that conducts, transmits, receives, generates, or otherwise uses an electrical current and/or signal during the operation of the component. An optoelectronic component is an electronic component that also uses an optical signal during operation. An optoelectronic integrated circuit is a set of optoelectronic components on one small flat piece referred to as a “chip”, which is created from a batch fabrication process using a wafer. The wafer may include semiconductor material (e.g., silicon) overlaid with additional material layers (e.g., metal, oxide, etc.) to simultaneously fabricate a large number of the optoelectronic integrated circuits. Subsequent to the wafer fabrication, multiple optoelectronic integrated circuits are separated into chips for final packaging. The layout of the optoelectronic integrated circuit is the designed placement of planar geometric component shapes of the optoelectronic integrated circuit. A fabrication pattern of the optoelectronic integrated circuit is the pattern of semiconductor, oxide, metal, or other material layers formed on a wafer, die, and/or chip based on the layout. Misalignment is the shifting among layers in the fabrication pattern with respect to the layout.
A p-n junction is a boundary or interface between a p-type region and an n-type region of semiconductor material. The p-type region and the n-type region (referred to as doped regions) are created by selectively doping (e.g., via an ion implantation process, diffusion process, epitaxy process, etc.) the semiconductor material using a p-type dopant or an n-type dopant, respectively. The fabrication pattern of the p-type region and the n-type region is based on one or more lithographic masks used to perform the selective doping. In a reverse biased condition, the p-n junction is electrically equivalent to a capacitor in series with a resistor. In particular, the capacitance depends on the depletion width and the resistance depends on the geometry of the doped regions. The p-n junction and associated doped regions form a diode.
A waveguide is an optoelectronic component having a physical structure that confines and guides the propagation of an electromagnetic (EM) wave, e.g., as an optical signal. A mode is an electromagnetic (EM) field pattern in the waveguide. The fabrication pattern of the waveguide corresponds to the physical structure and is based on one or more lithographic masks used to form the physical structure.